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Posted by: Amelia Raines
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History, Imaginary maps, Military History
Posted by: Amelia Raines
When Ohio became a state in 1803, breaking off from the Northwest Territory, parts of the border remained ambiguous. Three decades later, this ambiguity led to a conflict between Ohioans and Michiganders which became known as the Toledo War. In the state’s enabling act, the northern boundary of Ohio was defined as “an east and …
Posted in: 18th century cartography, 19th century cartography, American History, Borders
Posted by: Amelia Raines
The dramatic eruption of Krakatoa (or Krakatau in Indonesian) in 1883 was, as our sister blog Headlines and Heroes describes it, “one of the first global catastrophes.” By its very destruction, this small Indonesian island was thrust onto the world stage, its name becoming almost shorthand for volcanic disaster. Geologist Rogier Verbeek, who had briefly …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, Asian History, Oceania, Physical Geography
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Recently I came across an interesting map of Florida in our collections. Dated 1823, the map was made only four years after the territory of Florida was ceded to the United States by Spain, and 22 years before it became a state in its own right. The map, authored by surveyor Charles Vignoles and engraved …
Posted in: 16th century cartography, 18th century cartography, 19th century cartography, 21st century cartography, American History, Hispanic American History, National Parks
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Take a look at this monsoon chart, paying special attention to the western Indian Ocean between the east coast of Africa and the west coast of India, and you might notice a pattern: The left chart depicts the prevailing winds in the Indian Ocean in February; the right, in August. In winter, a sea of …
Posted in: 16th century cartography, 17th century cartography, 19th century cartography, African History, Asian History, Exploration
Posted by: Amelia Raines
With possibly as many as 7,000 languages used around the world, it was only a matter of time before some of them would make it onto a map. Language maps, linguistic maps, or – if the map shows ethnic information as well – ethnolinguistic maps are a type of thematic map: a map which displays …
Posted in: 18th century cartography, 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Growing up in Michigan, I was a lake enthusiast from a young age, and extremely proud that my home state was surrounded by North America’s most important inland bodies of water. These are, of course, the Great Lakes, so called because of their size – according to the 2020 National Geographic Atlas of the World, …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography, African History, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Amelia Raines
In 1887, a French lieutenant named Edmond Caron sailed a gunboat down the Niger River to gather information and expand French influence in the western Sahel. After setting out from the colonial capital in Saint-Louis, on the Atlantic coast of Senegal, he traveled inland to the Inner Niger Delta of modern central Mali, an area …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, African History
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Old maps are fantastic windows into history. If you want to know what the world was like 100, 200, or 500 years ago, you can look at a map published at that time and see where borders were located, what places were named, and what the land looked like (at least, to the degree of …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History, Borders